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    Quick & Easy Dehydrated Meals in a Bag
    Quick & Easy Dehydrated Meals in a Bag
    Quick & Easy Dehydrated Meals in a Bag
    Ebook243 pages1 hour

    Quick & Easy Dehydrated Meals in a Bag

    By Tammy Gangloff, Steven Gangloff and September Ferguson

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    About this ebook

    For hikers, home gardeners, or anyone who wants to be prepared for an emergency, quick and easy package-and-prepare meals—just add water!
     
    If you want to have quality food to take on the trail or to the campground for pennies a meal; preserve the bounty from your backyard garden; or store nutritious fare for weather or other emergencies, prepackaged meals in a bag are an affordable and healthy option. This collection of recipes, with tips on dehydrating equipment and storage, allows you to have fast, simple dinners, desserts, snacks, appetizers, and more ready to go, or to throw into the crockpot. Prepare dehydrated:
     
    • Peach, Raisin, and Oatmeal Cookies
    • Pineapple Pork and Rice
    • Mascarpone and Spinach Linguini
    • Spicy Roasted Red Pepper Hummus
    • Lentil Chicken Chili
    Spicy Sausage Breakfast Bake, and much more!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJun 14, 2023
    ISBN9780811766111
    Quick & Easy Dehydrated Meals in a Bag

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      Book preview

      Quick & Easy Dehydrated Meals in a Bag - Tammy Gangloff

      Chapter 1

      What Is a Meal in a Bag?

      INTRODUCTION

      We’ve all done it: paid for the easy accessibility of store-bought meals in a box. You know what we’re talking about! Walk down any grocery aisle and you will find boxes of easy meals or side dishes. The main work has been done, all the seasonings and spices are there; just add a few ingredients and you’re ready in minutes.

      Whether you’re a stay-at-home mom or dad, a working parent, or a caregiver of any kind, life is crazy busy. We get it! We spend much of our lives running around between jobs, hobbies, and errands, shuttling the kids from place to place, all the while harboring that nagging question in the backs of our minds: What am I making for dinner tonight?

      Often, we make what is fast and easy. But for this, we have to compromise. We pay extra money to purchase the pre-boxed meal, and we pay the health cost on these often over-processed and sodium- saturated items.

      It’s about time we share with you our secret to making easy, healthy, and cost-effective meals in a snap, using your own ingredients, ready at your fingertips. Don’t fall out of your chair yet—we’re just getting to the good part!

      Our first book, The Ultimate Dehydrator Cookbook, showed you the art of food dehydration, preparation, and rehydration. We got you started with instructions on dehydrating foods from A to Z, and introduced you to rehydrating and making meals, desserts, and treats. In this book we will take you into a new realm of ingenuity as we tackle making meals in a bag with your dehydrated fruits and veggies.

      Now, what exactly is a meal in a bag? It’s the convenience of store-bought pre-prepared meals, without the compromise to your bank account and your health. It’s the freedom to go beyond Turkey Pieces and Gravy and to create your own family-loved recipes; delicious, healthy, pre-prepared, pre-packaged, and ready to enjoy.

      Why make meals in a bag? As hinted above, there are many benefits. A single-serving boxed meal will cost you a few dollars, or even close to ten dollars for a quality lean or fit version. Extrapolate that for your entire family, and you can see how much you are paying for convenience. With dehydrated foods you can purchase fresh items in bulk and in larger quantities, and store for years without the use of the electricity or the fear of freezer burn, and with less food waste. You can make a single bag meal containing the serving size needed for your whole family, saving on packaging cost and environmental impact. You will find your weekly grocery bill shrinking like a carrot in your dehydrator.

      Important, too, are the health benefits of this venture. Try the flip game with your family next time you walk down your local grocer’s frozen meal aisle. Try to guess the amount of preservatives in a meal, flip it over, and see if you were close. You will be shocked. A single one-cup serving of a popular brand of frozen lasagna contains 810 mg of sodium. Depending on your appetite, it is not hard to imagine consuming 1,620 to 2,430 mg of sodium in a single meal— even if you drink water and skip dessert. The FDA recommends that adults limit their sodium intake to less than 2,300 mg per entire day. A high-sodium diet is well recognized in the medical community as having a direct impact on blood pressure, a consequence that causes many long-term health problems.

      This is just sodium. Imagine the other preservatives, calories, and saturated fats in these highly processed and flash-frozen items. Dehydration itself preserves the food, so any salt used in the recipes in this book is for taste and not preservation. Too, flash freezing is recognized by the Department of Agriculture to deplete vitamins and nutrients from food to a degree twenty to forty times that of dehydrating. When you make your meals yourself, you choose your own fresh ingredients. You know exactly what goes into what you feed your family. No more worrying about your family’s allergies and dietary restrictions. No difficult-to-pronounce chemicals or additives. By doing it yourself, you have the ability to create a meal that is specific to your family’s needs.

      Custom-made meals in a bag are like having a whole grocery store at the tips of your fingers, and the best part is, it won’t go bad! With our help, making meals in a bag is as simple as . . . well . . . apple pie in a bag!

      GETTING STARTED

      Getting started is easy. Most of your meals in a bag will require the use of your already-dehydrated foods. If you have yet to dehydrate anything, then we suggest picking up The Ultimate Dehydrator Cookbook, our must-have A-to-Z guide for dehydrating. Also, some of the meals in this book will require fresh produce that we will teach you to dehydrate to make a complete meal, so get those dehydrators ready!

      Assembling Your Meals in a Bag

      For optimal storage, your dehydrated items should be stored in vacuum-sealed bags containing an oxygen pack. Those vacuum- sealed bags may then be double-bagged inside a puncture-proof and light-proof Mylar bag, which you may label with the recipe title and instructions.

      For the vacuum-bag ingredients, we have organized the recipes in this book into Large Bag and Small Bag categories, as sometimes certain items must be kept separate. Each bag should contain an oxygen pack and be vacuum-sealed separately.

      We prefer to use fresh meat in our recipes, but if you choose to package freeze-dried meats with your meals it can be done, but meat must be placed inside a separate bag.

      Materials

      Dehydrator: The dehydrator you choose is the most important part of the dehydrating process. If you do not have a good dehydrator it can really affect the efficiency with which you can dehydrate food. Check out The Ultimate Dehydrator Cookbook for an in-depth discussion of what to look for in a dehydrator. Here is a quick synopsis:

      •Fan placement should be in the back of the dehydrator, not the top or bottom.

      •Look for plastic mesh trays, as metal can burn your food.

      •Temperature controls are a must! Different foods require different temperatures.

      •Ditch the timer! You can’t overdry your food, and the constant airflow will only benefit your food.

      Dehydrator Dryer Sheets: These are not the mesh trays that come with the dehydrator but they are just as important. These are solid Teflon-coated 100 percent nonstick sheets that allow you to dry liquid or small items that could fall between the cracks of the mesh trays.

      Vacuum Sealer: We suggest a heavy-duty vacuum sealer with dual (or double-piston) suction motors.

      Vacuum Bags: The vacuum bags must be at least twoply and three millimeters (mm) in thickness. We also recommend channeled (embossed, textured, or microchannel) bags because they contain grooves that allow for streamlined air removal, giving them a tighter seal. The bags are very important, so do not settle for a less-durable bag; it is what will keep your food safe.

      Mylar Bags: These are also important to reflect heat and light away from the food, helping to increase the shelf life for long-term storage. For optimal storage, place your vacuum- sealed bags into a Mylar bag and then heat-seal the Mylar bag (you cannot vacuum seal a Mylar bag).

      Oxygen Packs: These will remove any residual oxygen left around your food after vacuum-sealing, protecting your food from any degradation. A one-gallon bag will require one 100 cc pack.

      Desiccant Packs: Similar to oxygen packs, desiccant packs are small packs designed to remove residual water from items. They may sometimes be called clay packs or gel packs based on the particular desiccant material. Properly dehydrated items should not require desiccant packs. However, if you do choose to use them, make sure they are food safe.

      Labels: Labels are important. These should tell the name of the dish, the date it was dehydrated, and the cooking directions. You can write directly on your Mylar bag with a permanent marker if you wish. However, Mylar bags are reusable, so you may wish instead to use paper or sticker labels that can later be removed. You can even have fun with designing beautiful and fun labels! Think of how much nicer it will look when you gift a meal to a friend or family member with your own personal label design. You eat with your eyes first, so let’s make a great first impression!

      Bags and Sizes

      Throughout our recipes, we have divided up our ingredients by bag size. We do this because some ingredients require a barrier between each other, or sometimes simply because they are used at different points throughout the recipe.

      The medium and small bags can be translucent Ziploc freezer bags or vacuum-seal bags. Place these bags inside the large Mylar bag to separate food. Here is the breakdown:

      Large Bag = 1-gallon Mylar bag

      Medium Bag = 4 cups or 1 quart

      Small Bag = 2 cups or 1 pint

      Oxygen Absorbers:

      50 cc for 1 quart and smaller

      100 cc per 1 gallon

      Desiccant Packs (gel silica, activated

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